


the hero's shoulders

by toujours_nigel



Series: Electorate [1]
Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 16:30:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5593168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes three years, to birth a newer self.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the hero's shoulders

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



In the car, going back, Akrur Singh asks, “Anything we need to cover up?” It’s offhanded enough that Shyam, impaired from years of living with forthright people, nearly tells him everything.

Vasu Bhaiyya, who won’t start drinking yet for a few hours, gets there faster. “Just Shyam flirting with any woman who would hold still long enough.” His tone matches Akrur’s to a nicety, and his grip on Shyam’s hand is cruelly tight.

Akrur laughs, says, “Well, boys will be boys. One bit of advice, kiddo, promise anything, but write nothing down.”

Coming away, Shyam’s heart had been in his mouth and he had thought many things involving divorces and swift illegal weddings. He swallows them down and smiles. Vasu glances at him and then away, but nobody else can tell how fake it is. Nobody knows.

* * *

           

After the dust has settled and their parents are out of prison and the party is falling over itself to protest innocence and a lack of complicity, Vasu corners him against an unlikely wall and says, “No more dalliances with married women. I don’t want your explanations. The next husband may not be as stupid and complaisant. Now on out you buy whores or you go with girls you can marry without shaming us, should the need arise.”

Shyam pushes him off, wrings his hands, rubs them together to brush away the gunpowder stink, the grains of it and oil smearing his palms, settled into the fine lines of them. A tamancha is not as good as a proper gun, but oh how much easier to obtain.

“Say yes,” Vasu prompts, “say yes Bhaiyya and mean it. I’ve got to have the body disposed of before anyone calls the police.”

“The police are in our hands,” Shyam says, brings his fingertips to his nose, inhales. Beneath everything there is still a smear of butter, of sunshine.

“Calls up his father-in-law, then. Come on, Shyam, we’re blaming it on our friends the Maoists, but that won’t work if we keep waiting. Say yes.”

He is startled into sense by that. “We can’t blame the Maoists, it’ll never hold.” Surely they know this?

Vasu grins, slit-eyed and snake-like. “I’m sure they won’t get furious and cut all our throats as we sleep,” he says. “Nanaji used to be friends with them, after all. What’s one betrayal among friends? What’s the matter, Shyam?”

“You can’t let them. They’re mazed. Bohra gaye hain. Prison’s rotted their minds. Stop them.”

“They won’t listen to me. They shouldn’t. I’m a hothead and can’t think beyond the next bottle of booze, remember. They might listen to you, but I’m sure you have middle-aged women to pine over.”

“Bhaiyya, you can’t!”

“You’ll forget her in a year,” Vasu says, ruffles his curls with a smoky hand. “Go on, but remember not to shout, they’re our parents and we only just got them back.”

“If I don’t forget her in a year?”

“Then it’ll take two. Say yes Bhaiyya.”

“Yes Bhaiyya,” he says, and runs bullet-quick through the halls to stop his parents from being criminally-stupid and alienating their only allies. There are spectral Radhas stretching arms out to him from every corner and window, but they melt easily into the brick and plaster and night-dark air.

* * *

 

It takes three years. He keeps his head down and sidles his way into every meeting and council. He talks rarely and listens well and uses Vasu to push his decisions. They don’t trust him yet as well as Vasu, two years older and two stone heavier and genial enough to look stupid. He can wait: he’s too charming just yet and too sharp and to many minds too soft. He can wait, he has time.

For his eighteenth birthday his grandfather gives him a Jeep, his father a rifle, and his mother a little sister. He’s been gone all year, in Patna when not in school, out of the world of women and aiming to stay so. The little bundle in his arms is dark-eyed and dark-haired and has a pink gummy grin. He wants to say she has his father’s eyes and his mother’s hair and complexion, but he can only think of how she came into life, how he misses sinking into the wet heat of a woman’s cunt and sinking teeth and raking nails over rounded flesh. He makes the appropriate noises and goes to the roof to drink to forget.

Vasu puts him to bed that night, climbs in after him and never tells.

 

In the morning there is coffee, bags packed and put away in his new car, and plans for reconnaissance lightly disguised as a roadtrip. “Patna to Delhi”, Vasu Bhaiyya tells him, and mercifully hands over a flask of Irish coffee to jolt him awake. “Just drive. Just drive and don’t think. You think too much, Shyam, that’s always been your problem.”

“You employ me for my thinking,” he objects, after being stifled yet again. The smell of new leather is distinctly less appealing with his nose smashed right up against it.

“News to me,” Vasu says. “Here, switch over. If you have to think, think of how we’re going to ingratiate ourselves with Shruti bua. She had a kid last year and with one thing and another we never looked in on her.”

“If it’s a boy we congratulate her. If it’s a girl we congratulate her harder and then get out of the way before anyone can start comparing her to Baba or Pritha bua.”

 

It’s a boy. Thank gods and little fishes. It comes into Vasu’s arms and thence into Shyam’s with a startling lack of fuss while Shruti bua watches them with serious, worried eyes.

“He won’t speak,” she says, “and there’s something wrong with his limbs. I keep him lying down so nobody notices, but he’s nearly one, I can’t keep it hidden much longer.”

They stare at each other and Shyam, helpless and pinned under the weight of Vasu’s gaze, runs hands over the baby, coaxing life and movement. He gets kicked for his efforts, right in his bruised nose.

Shruti squeaks, rushes to pick her son up, cradle the pounding fists in one hand and kiss them.

“There,” Vasu says, slipping into place smoothly in front of Shyam. “I guess he was just lazy. Bua, it’s been wonderful staying with you the last couple of days, but we’ve really got to get a move on.”

Back in the car and pelting out of the driveway, the neighbourhood, the town, the district, Vasu says, “Really, chhotu,” in a tone that suggests small boys having absconded with pats of butter.

“I did nothing. Nothing. You asked me to. What were you looking at me for if you didn’t want me to?”

“That boy’s going to be trouble,” Vasu says. “Now, Pritha bua’s bhabi just had a daughter, sure you don’t want to gatecrash and show off there?”

“Maybe later,” he says, and pulls onto the side of the road so Vasu can drive while he snoozes in the back seat. It has been years since his hands smelt of anything but ink and gunpowder and blood. He cannot remember how sunshine smells, tastes to the mouth like fresh butter. 

* * *

 

 

Dhrupad Panchal has two daughters, one son, and an iron grip over Farrukhabad and Bareilly. The younger children are three, firecrackers whirling about the open angans and long corridors of the haveli. The older, Shikha, is eighteen and courteous and like a shield wall held firm against his sorties of friendship. He does not blame her for it: he can see a trap well enough when it is laid for him, and she must feel less able than him to extricate herself from it. It is her home, after all, and her parents who have brought into it and are flinging at her two strangers of impeccable family and familial connections. Vasu shrugs and takes a child in each arm and disappears into the playroom, answers Shikha courtesy for courtesy and distance for distance. But Shyam is cursed with perseverance and perverse curiosity: in all his years he has never been with a woman and felt her yearning to leave.

He sets out to wear her down, probing his way like a man testing quicksand, retreating to the boundaries of consent and pushing at them. By the third night he has this measure of success: they are sitting on the open terrace after the house has gone to bed, and she is smiling at him without scorn and laughing at his jokes and leaning against his shoulder and drinking out of the same unlabelled bottle. The booze kicks like a brooding mare. It didn’t come out of his pack or Vasu Bhaiyya’s, but the bottom drawer of Shikha’s bureau from among its siblings. A night of surprises.

“It’s the only way I can bear it,” she tells him after they’ve necked half the bottle between them and even his head is reeling. Her hair has coiled out of its high severe bun and is hanging over his shoulder as she rests against it. “Are you shocked?”

“Not easily. Not by girls drinking or hating our life. What’s even in this?”

“Rice. Potatoes. Honey. Ethanol. Who cares, it gets you drunk.” She laughs and bites her lip and says, “Let’s see, not easily. Trying harder. I’ve tried killing myself. Shocked yet?”

“Only that you’re telling me.”

In the moonlight and the halogen light glancing up from the driveway her eyes are darkly bright and her skin is drained pale and her mouth pale to whiteness with a livid line where her teeth have bitten down. He wants to set his teeth on that wound and make it deeper, make it bleed. He hands her the bottle and she drinks deep.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, or the day after, or next week. What does it matter and who will believe you? And anyway, Yadavji, I’ve heard about you, you creep around with terrorists in forests, why would you even remember anything I tell you? You can’t even leverage this against Babuji, the party won’t let you. It’s not much news. I don’t look mad, it’s not interesting.”

“If you were I wouldn’t,” he promises, and she curls her lip at him and passes the bottle back. “Especially if you give me a bottle of this. It’s like raw ethanol.”

“You’d be dead if it were. Well, can’t let you off without shocking you. I’m a man. In my head. I’m a man.” She laughs again, a high chilling thing. “Well?”

“Full marks for trying,” he says, drinks and nearly chokes on a thought. “Am I the cure?”

“If fucking a man was likely to do it, you might have done. My parents think you might do, you or Vasu. I’m not a lesbian.” She reaches out, fingers knocking against the bottle, and grips his hand. “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

She is. He is beautiful and determined and his jaw is tight with terror. Shyam frees his hand and wraps his arm around the narrow, stiff shoulders, and puts the lip of the bottle to the clamped lips. For a time, as long as it takes for the bottle to pass between them once and again and empty, they are quiet.

Shikha says, “They’ll be looking for us soon. Mai doesn’t like me sitting out on the roof drunk. Come down, I’ll make us coffee.”

He is used to these silences, retreats after much has been said. Radha avoided him a full week, after that evening in the park. Vasu had to hunt him down after Akrur Singh came for them.

They go down the stairs and ducking past the central angan out into the empty courtyard and the party-workers’ kitchen. It’s better looked after than the analogue in his grandfather’s house, or perhaps they have a more docile, cowering lot here. Shikha brings down two steel mugs from a cupboard and spoons out sugar, milk powder, and Nescafe, fills the kettle and puts it on the gas ring, pounds the mixture into submission while the water boils. Shyam perches on a counter and brushes his bare toes shivering against the stone flags of the floor, studies the cracks and the pattern of them.

The coffee is good enough he burns his tongue on the froth and his fingers on the metal.

“I’m taking a flask of this as well,” he decides, and Shikha nods. He can’t think of that body as belonging to a man, with its long hands and narrow shoulders and slim waist and high, shallow breasts and deep-set eyes and lush mouth. At sixteen he would have had her already pressed up against a wall with ankles locked behind his back.

But he has Mohini, and he is long and dark and beginning to reach his full, formidable breadth of shoulder and has to shave twice a day. And his body, with its muscles and hair and vulnerable extruded groin, is some days, some nights, the body of a woman.

At length he says, “What name do you like?”

Shikha stares at him, bangs her mug down into the sink and leans against it, palms tight around the sharp clean edge of it. “Nobody’s ever asked,” she says. He says. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I advise against Babua. Or Lalu, all things concerned. Or Brijeshwar. Oh, you could be Salim.” He hops off the counter and spreads his arms out, theatrically, “Taqdeerein badal jaati hai, zamana badal jaata hai, mulkon ki tarikh badal jaati hi, Shahenshah badal jaate hai, magar is badalti hui duniya mein mohabbat jis insaan ka daaman thaam leti hai, woh insaan nahin badalta!”

That brings Shikha up laughing. “Maan gaye Mughal-e-Azam. I’ve got a cassette of it, come on, we’ll watch. Can’t sleep on this much coffee.”

They heckle everyone except Prithviraj Kapoor throughout the film. If it had been a movie hall they would have for sure been thrown out. At four Shikha’s mother looks in on them sitting in separate arm-chairs with depleted chips packets littering the floor between them and shakes her head fondly and retires. By then it is very nearly the end and they dutifully lower the volume over the last bout of thrashing, melodrama, and Madhubala being beautifully set into a wall.

Shikha says, “Salim disqualified. Won’t do. Next?”

“Alamgirh Shahenshah Aurangzeb,” Shyam replies promptly. “We can go to America with the jiziya tax.”

“Shekhar do you? Shekhar,” he says, sounding it out. “I think that’s it.”

“Unadventurous,” Shyam sniffs, and holds his hand tight across the space between them, twined fingertips brushing against a packet of Uncle Chips.


End file.
